The Price of Having Fun in Curitiba, Brazil
HAVANA TIMES – For any society to develop, hard work is necessary, and to keep that effort from turning into a vicious cycle, workers need time to relax, whether by resting at home, enjoying free activities, or going out to have some fun.
Having fun is generally expensive, and Curitiba, Brazil, is no exception. In fact, it is one of the most expensive cities in a country not exactly known for high wages. So, if you’re going out, you have to calculate your budget carefully so you don’t go overboard.
I normally avoid the kind of outings that eat into my savings. I’m more likely to have lunch with friends or go out for ice cream with my family. But the 24th was my birthday, and since we hadn’t been able to go out together since we moved, we planned to go to the movies and then have dinner.
Curitiba is full of shopping malls, which are very convenient because of their multipurpose nature. In Brazil, they simply call a mall or shopping center a shopping. We have two near our home, Ventura and Palladium, both of which have movie theaters and food courts. We chose Palladium because it is a little bigger and more modern.
That day I asked to work only until noon. My boss agreed. At five, when my wife arrived with our daughter, we had a snack and got ready to go out, since the movie started at six-thirty.
There were two choices at the theater, The Odyssey and Spider-Man. We chose the latter because it was in 3D, something neither my wife nor my six-year-old daughter had ever experienced before. Our little girl had been very excited ever since we started planning the day.
Right in the middle of the movie, she leaned over and whispered in my ear that this was the best day of her life. That made me extremely happy, because in recent years I have become a conscious collector of moments like these with my family.
We paid 77.50 reais for the three of us, even though we skipped the popcorn-and-soda combos. Partly because we had eaten a snack at home and were planning to have dinner afterward, and partly because the combos ranged from 30 to 130 reais. (A little over 5 reals equals 1 USD.)
For a working family with a combined income of between 3,000 and 5,000 reais, given the current cost of living, 77 reais is not money that can be spent lightly, since rent and food alone can easily cost between 2,000 and 3,000 reais. Those 77 reais can represent a significant portion of what you have left at the end of the month to put into savings.
Still, a day is a day, as we used to say in Cuba, where suffering and the lack of prospects led us to utter that phrase more often than we should have.
When the movie ended, we went to the food court, a huge L-shaped corridor lined with everything from restaurants and international franchises to small cafés run by local entrepreneurs, along with the ever-present Chinese eateries.
We chose a self-service restaurant where the person serving us couldn’t pronounce Portuguese properly, but the food was very good. We ate some things we had never tried before, such as tofu and kani kama (crab sticks), and others we rarely get to eat, such as salmon.
The dinner bill came to 133 reais. Together with the movie and the Uber, the outing cost 240 reais. That amount represents approximately 15% of the minimum wage, and in my case I have to work two days to earn it. But as an exception, it was well worth it.
Read more from the diary of Osmel Almaguer here in Havana Times.